Excerpt from I See You Made an Effort by Annabelle Gurwitch, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He's typing in codes and waxing on about which cities have the best infrastructures and I am fantasizing about his possible Wikipedia entry: After AuDum Genius met Annabelle Gurwitch [we have the same initials—we can share monogrammed luggage and towels], he began his innovative and transformative design work. But I know that's a stretch. I don't have the money to become his patron. I would love to be his Peggy Guggenheim; alas, the best I can aim for is to be his Mrs. Robinson.*

This idea has nothing to do with my actual marriage, though I have started to suspect that the timbre of my husband's burp has been specifically calibrated to annoy me. More than half of our communication revolves around who will volunteer first to pick up our kid, our dinner, or our sex life. If you were to catch a glimpse of my face during the throes of passion, you might mistake my expression for that of a bartender at four a.m., shaking her last martini—one who enjoys her work and wants to please every customer, but is also relieved her shift is ending soon.

All of which is to say that we're in the middle of our marriage. I have come to appreciate that there are some great things about the middle of a marriage. The way neither of us understands flavored coffees or movies where people exchange bodies, and no matter how angry we are, we'll stop in the middle of an argument to watch our cats do something cute. But middles can be thankless. Beginnings are always exciting, even if in a car-crash/ impending-disaster way. Endings, even heart-wrenching ones, can be energizing. Friends who have gotten divorced go on diets and dates. Even when those end badly they make for good stories.

* It's been widely noted, but is always worth repeating, that Anne Bancroft was only six years Dustin Hoffman's senior when she played his seductress in The Graduate.

The historical precedent for the kind of female May-December fling I'm considering isn't great, especially if you're looking for something long-term. In fiction, it doesn't end well for Emma Bovary, Countess Olenska, or Mrs. Robinson, for that matter. Even Samantha's infamously tireless libido in Sex and the City couldn't forestall the inevitable breakup with her hunky blond boy toy Smith.

I also hate the term "cougar." There isn't a name for men who date younger women; it's just considered normal. I do have girlfriends who have booty calls with younger men, and one friend who, after two divorces and three children, is happily dating a woman ten years younger. Another, also divorced with kids, leads sex tours of Paris for women who, as she advertises on her website, have already "married, divorced, cut our hair off, and reinvented." All of that sounds positively exhausting to me. I had plenty of random sex in my twenties and thirties.

I have held a special fantasy for one of my exes. He's the path not taken. A tall, remote, Italian Catholic heartbreaker, the polar opposite of my five-six, adoring Jewish husband. That he dumped me unceremoniously, by all accounts is happily married with kids and has never once in twenty years reached out to me hasn't stopped me from daydreaming about the call or email imploring me to run away with him. That is, until I ran into him in a restaurant this year. He looked weathered but still had his rakish swagger. We embraced, but before the shock of this reunion could even register as sexual tension, he began recounting the details of his recent hip-replacement surgery.

Dear God, I just want one night of Genius sex before I hit the half-century mark.

But where would we do it? At his apartment? No. There might be hairs of unknown provenance on the soap, black towels, and sheets that haven't been changed recently. Plus, one of his roommates might be there, and no one can witness this act.

My house? No. What if he accidentally puts on one of my kid's T-shirts, strewn around the house as they are? We also have kid artwork hanging everywhere and it just seems wrong that we would sneak by the watercolor rendering of a dinosaur pooping as we head into the bedroom. On top of that, my menopausal brain fog makes it impossible to keep schedules straight, so there is a good chance I would pick an inopportune moment to hook up and AuDum would arrive just in time to witness our nightly ritual of haggling with our teenager over homework versus Internet time. But there's another big problem, and that's the "ick" factor of having sex in the bed I share with my husband. That didn't seem to bother California's governor Arnold Schwarzenegger when he had an affair with his housekeeper, whom he probably asked to make said bed afterward. Plus, at any given moment, a pair of Spanx might be crumpled in a ball at the foot of our bed, a tube of hormone replacement cream on the night-stand, or one of the many pairs of tweezers I hide around the house might have migrated under a pillow. Our bedroom is a mine field of erection killers—just ask my husband.

Excerpted from I See You Made an Effort by Annabelle Gurwitch. Copyright © 2014 by Annabelle Gurwitch. Excerpted by permission of Blue Rider Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.